Afraid of the dark?

What is it about certain words?
No matter how much we abuse them, misuse them, or refuse to use them, somehow they still maintain their power.
You’d think in this age of endless hype, that we’d run out of things to say, or people willing to listen, or care.
Take New Orleans’s mayor Ray Nagin for example. He’s in a hot water just for saying New Orleans should be a ‘Chocolate City’.
Did anybody really misunderstand that?
Is there anyone who believes that New Orleans – the Big Easy, as they call it, could ever be the same without the unique culture that lies at its foundation?
Louis Armstrong wasn’t born in Anaheim, California. He didn’t grow up listening to the marching bands at Disneyland.
New Orleans, the city that we all imagine, has a flavor that we can all taste, even if we have never been there.
The flavor of New Orleans is so strong that it has seeped in the river, the Mississippi, and found its way upstream into every corner of America, into all of our lives.
We know the truth, but the words still scare us.

I had a different reaction than most, when I heard what the mayor said. I didn’t think he was saying anything unusual but, I thought, he was being a bit greedy.
New Orleans already has a great nickname – The Big Easy, they don’t need another.
And I thought, isn’t Washington D.C., the original ‘Chocolate City’?
When I was a young man, living just outside our nation’s capital, I first heard that term. It started, I believe, with a famous funk group of the time, who had an album entitled ‘Chocolate City, and its Vanilla Suburbs’.
That, I thought at the time, was telling it like it is. And that, I still feel, was a wonderful irony: just a few years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior, the capital of a racist nation was 90% black.
I’m still convinced most Americans aren’t aware of that. They think of the Capital in terms of the monuments and the government, not the half million or more blacks that live there.
D.C. is like that old movie, Lost Horizons: hidden in the center of the world, is a majority black southern city!
Chocolate City indeed.

Maybe what most Americans are reacting to, when they hear that term, is their own city, or town, or neighborhood.
If Washington D.C. is a chocolate city, what flavor is their own community?
Tutti Frutti, Rocky Road, Butter Pecan?
If there isn’t an obvious self-consciousness about race in America today, there still is a degree of subconscious guilt: so some words or phrases still make us wince.
On the other hand, a good nickname can do a lot for a town. A bad nickname will keep the tourists away, no matter what.
Take ‘America’s Home Town’, please!
No, that’s not fair. ‘America’s Home Town’ is a great slogan, for tourists headed here with their history books in hand.
But for everybody else, it doesn’t sound like much fun, does it?
And it certainly doesn’t have any ‘taste appeal’.

So we’ve come to the question, what flavor is Plymouth?
Vanilla is, of course, an obvious and perhaps controversial choice.
Plymouth would seem to quality for official vanilla status too, as according to the 2000 census we have only a very small minority population: less than 2% blacks, a hundred or so Native Americans, a few hundred Asians.
But it’s probably not accurate, to say Plymouth’s character is ‘vanilla’.
Is any American truly vanilla?
On job applications I have to put a check in the ‘Caucasian’ box, but as I do so I always long for a more detailed choice. After all, I am do-it-yourself ice cream Sunday kind of Caucasian, with a scoop each of Ireland and France, Romania and Russia, covered by syrup that is equal parts Catholic and Jew.
And my kids: well, just say that Tutti Frutti doesn’t begin to cover it.
So though Plymouth is statistically ‘white’, I’m sure the reality is far more ‘flavorful’.
Maybe Plymouth could be the ‘Chocolate Chip City’: you know, vanilla with freckles?
Or how about ‘Mint Chocolate Chip’, which you might say is Vanilla, with freckles, and an Hispanic brother-in-law?
Maybe we could claim to be the Howard Johnsons of America: you know, with 57 flavors.
Or are we perhaps a bit more bland - the Dunkin Donuts of America: a regular, with the blue stuff, to go.
I remember a decade or so ago, when Dunkin Donuts tried to change the coffee drinking habits of New Englander’s? Instead of their standard Cinnamon roast style, they were pushing a more robust, Seattle style of coffee.
They knew it would be tough.
They knew we would resist it.
So they came up with a special slogan, meant to address our fears.
“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”.
Maybe the town’s slogan should be, “Don’t be Disappointed by the Rock.”
I don’t think anyone is really afraid of the idea of a Chocolate City.
It’s just the words that make us nervous.